Half Empty by Tim Hall
“Yuppie: someone who has moved into your neighborhood six months after you” (24).
With such apparent hostility, so early, one would expect Tim Hall’s novel, Half Empty, to be a singly motivated separation/dissection of social strata. Not the case. Dennis, the recently alcohol independent protagonist, lives a closet yuppie life, maybe even hates himself for it, but isn’t above an open-minded caste-rummage in search of smiles and perhaps a woman to share them with.
Half Empty relies on simple premise: a man caught between the old and the new. Shauna is the ex and represents a shared party lifestyle (with sex: “…she gasped and yelled, scratched a bit, groaned and cried…” [140]). Laurie is the new attraction and promises stability (“…clearly a better technician…she performed her maneuvers with a kind of scientific detachment” [140]). Dennis, now “one dental cleaning away from his 30th birthday” (44), wrestles between youthful promiscuity and aged maturity, unsure where among the stratum he should settle.
The novel contains a fair amount of sex, some gratuitous, at times where more motivated character parings may instead have opted for conversation or shared dreams. Dennis goes from fucking Shauna, to fucking Laurie, and back within a matter of pages. But it is this very one-dimensionality that puts Dennis’s ultimate gesture of honestly into powerful perspective. Personal worries—work, money, parents—are stable, which allows the novel’s focus to remain on the women in Dennis’s life. This stripped obligation reflects the central conflict of the story: finding the right woman means finding himself.
From the first line of the book we see Dennis as an accessory to violence, promising his consistent association with all things visceral. Though he would rather not be a central element to communal entanglement, he is always conscious of the hope hidden within. As he says near the end of the novel, “there would always be another fairy god mother.”
Tim Hall. Half Empty. Wayne: Undie Press, 2004, 2009. $14.95, paper, ISBN: 978-0-9763460-5-0.
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